One downside of turning your release strategies into scavenger hunts and layering clues within your work is that it invites enormous amounts of scrutiny about your potential motive. When Taylor Swift announced an expanded edition of last year’s critically maligned The Life of a Showgirl this week, subtitled The Encore, many fans instantly suspected one of two things: that it was designed to remind Grammy members of Showgirl’s existence during their voting period to determine next year’s nominees, or to oust country ingenue Ella Langley from her record-breaking US No 1 run. If that sounds cynical, it’s also worth remembering that when Swift announced Showgirl last year, she said that unlike her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department – a 16-track record immediately inflated to 31 songs on release day – the purposefully concise, 12-track Showgirl would not be expanded. (This didn’t stop her releasing 34 variants of the record, with various acoustic demos and so on, to juice sales.) After Showgirl had the biggest US opening week ever, Swift went to Sweden to celebrate with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, she revealed this week.
The trip was intended to be about reflection and gratitude, she wrote on Instagram. A slipperiness has infected the whole endeavour, not helped by Swift’s initial promise that Showgirl was all “bangers” and about “keeping the bar really high”, a claim quickly dismissed: the record is a travesty, a word that feels particularly apt when you recall Wood, a Bruno Mars-lite abomination about her now-husband Travis Kelce’s penis. And for an album that was supposed to be about the giddy highs of life on Swift’s own record-breaking Eras tour, it contained a tedious amount of well-worn score-settling.
Adding four more songs written some time after the initial sessions further dilutes the record’s already flimsy premise. The most Swiftian thing about these four tracks is their visceral sense of course-correction. For all that Swift chafes against The Haters – more on them to come, shocker – she’s always reacting to criticism.
Recall the scene from her Miss Americana documentary where she learns that her sixth album, Reputation, didn’t get nominated for the album of the year Grammy: “I just need to make a better record,” she says, visibly crushed. (That’s the folly of working like this: Reputation is her best record, and those voters are idiots.) Showgirl was panned for its excessive wordiness and defaulting on the promised bangers; these Encore songs largely pare back the verbiage and double down on hooks and firework-laden bridges, Swift’s metier. It’s like watching an ambitious chorus line dancer breathlessly flay herself in the spotlight to prove herself worthy of our love. Every Swift album except Reputation has a deluxe version, though just a handful of those bonus songs are keepers: Jump Then Fall (from Fearless), New Romantics (1989), Bigger Than the Whole Sky and Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve (Midnights).
None of these new songs are destined to join those ranks, though Patient Zero comes closest. Hooked around a mournful and curiously processed Celtic fiddle sample, it recalls the spirit of Lover, where it felt as though Swift was trying out potential new sonic futures. Its pained chorus also evokes Tortured Poets’ Fortnight: a slinky, low-key yet insidiously catchy melodic Möbius strip, with lyrics offering connection to a woman recently burned by an ex whose games Swift knows well.
It’s one of two Encore songs that contain a palpable sense of humanity, unlike anything from its childish parent album. Pink Clouding is a mature apology to a kind ex she let down – “Neither of us knew at the time / That I was a liar” – filled with the sort of regret that will never lose its shameful sting. Unlike Swift’s post-2020 turn to heavily detailed narrative writing, it’s written in a pure-pop form, braiding shades of pink and various flowers into a sweet and effective conceit without defaulting on emotional grace.
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